Taking a Look at Some of My Progressing Fruits and Vegetables

This whole week has been busy in the garden especially with everything that is starting to produce flowers, fruit, and vegetables.  Right now it looks like my first zucchini of the year is going to be done within a week or so with good weather.  It has been growing every single day and it is definitely very noticeable to the naked eye that it is continuing to grow.  Once it stops growing or getting bigger that is how I know it is done.

All my tomatoes are growing and I have at least one of each type that has tomatoes.  This would include at least one steakhouse, one Roma, and one cherry tomato.  My cherry tomato plants at the moment actually have just flowers, but I am sure very soon this week I should have at least one growing on one of these plants.  Check out my steakhouse and Roma below.

One of my cucumber plants is already producing cucumbers, but at the moment none of them have been pollinated so far.  Luckily many of my other plants are starting to produce flowers as well and I think that my plants will have a better chance at pollination once most of my cucumbers are producing flowers.

Here is just one of those female flowers that have opened.  I am not sure if it received the pollen that was needed, but I should find out soon if it did or not.  This could possibly be the first cucumber of the season.








I did not mention my pumpkins in the previous post because they were not doing anything at the time.  Yesterday I noticed that a pumpkin had been growing on one of the vines for the past couple of days at least.  I didn't notice it earlier and it actually had an opened flower.  It was a sunny day and that is good because usually there are more of them during sunny mornings.  So there is a possibility that it had been pollinated, but I am not sure.

Seeing First Signs of Fruits and Vegetables

I thought I would write a post about a few plants that are starting to produce a couple of fruits and vegetables.  Granted these are probably just the early birds that are starting to grow, but nevertheless this is the start of the harvesting season.  I would say that the first vegetable that I will pick would be my zucchini.  It is the closest to being ready to be picked.

 This zucchini for the most part has been pollinated, but the one below still has a flower and I am not sure if a bee has done its job to that plant.  I would say in a day or so I should know whether or not it will be good.  If it doesn't rot real quick, then I can safely say that it was pollinated.

I am also getting some tomatoes on a few of my plants.  I am not quite sure what type of tomatoes they are, but I am certain that I will find out in a few days if not a week.  I usually don't label them except when they are in their pots growing inside, but once I put them outside I usually loose track of which one is which.  It is no big deal because as long as the plants grow tomatoes I will find out what they are.

If it is round then this would rule out Roma tomatoes and it means that it can only be cherry or steakhouse tomatoes.  If it is not round then obviously it is a Roma tomato.  For now I will just wait and see exactly what it can be.








The last vegetable I will discuss that I could possibly be getting real soon is my cucumbers.  Only one plant is actually starting to produce flowers.  They are still very small and have not flowered yet, but I am hoping that they will flower in the next couple of weeks.  It would be even better if they flowered and were pollinated at the same time.  It usually takes some time to get pollinated cucumbers, but I am sure that they will come in due time.

Picking Some More Iceberg Lettuce Leaves

Another day of picking iceberg lettuce which makes this only the second harvest of the season.  I did pick up some Ruby glow lettuce last week and I hope to pick some more of them in the future as well.  Today I only focused on my iceberg lettuce because the leaves were getting quite large and I don't think that they could get any bigger.

Once they reach a certain size I always like to pick them soon before the leaves start to turn brown and are no longer edible.  Luckily with these plants the leaves did not turn brown or go bad and instead they just kept on growing and stayed green for quite awhile.  Nevertheless it was time to pick them and I really want to eat them so I can enjoy the fruits of my labor.

I gathered 72 leaves today which is about the same as the first harvest.  I would normally be disappointed in the amount, but the size of the leaves definitely makes up for the amount.  The size and quality of the leaves easily beats the quantity.  Since they were so big I had to use five containers in order to collect them.

I would say that all the leaves were much bigger than my hand and could easily be double the size.  I was surprised when I started picking them off the plant.  I don't think I had any small leaves from any of the plants that I harvested from today.

You might not be able to see it, but underneath this leaf is my hand.  As you can see these leaves were very large and I can't wait to eat them.










Now that I discussed about my lettuce I picked today I want to let you know that I placed ropes on my bean trellis.  The bean vines should start growing and climbing the ropes that I placed in front of them.  Some of them have started to climb while others are not quite at that stage yet.  In a week or two all my bean plants should be climbing.

Time to Thin Out Those Carrots Along with Harvesting Ruby Glow Lettuce

My garden I had finally given me some good Ruby glow lettuce leaves that I could pick this week.  Picking lettuce leaves is very easy and since I had picked my other iceberg lettuce not that long ago I though it would be very good to pick these leaves to make up from last season.  I am very happy with the 65 leaves I picked and I couldn't ask for anymore from just eight plants that were planted this year.

 Just a little before and after picture of just one of the plants that I harvested.  I did not pick that many leaves because I wanted to make sure that it didn't go to seed early.  If I pick too many leaves it might prematurely go to seed and that would mean only one harvest of these plants which is something I didn't want to happen.  I just stuck to picking the bottom leaves rather than any other leaves on the plant.

The next thing I had to do was make sure that my carrots were thinned out and all the weeds removed.  Removing the weeds from my carrots is one of the more difficult tasks in the garden mainly due to the nature of carrot plants and how small and fragile they are.  Nevertheless I did get it done and it took about an entire day to do it correctly.

Here are just a bunch of carrot sprouts that needed to get thinned out.  They grew throughout the entire row, but some places had more or less plants sprouting.  It all depended on how many seeds I placed and how many of them actually sprouted.

 You can see that there were a bunch of carrot sprouts, but only one in every three to four inches could stay.  All the others needed to be removed.

Here is one of those plants that was able to stay because it was stronger and was probably one of the first sprouts to appear.  Now that the thinning process is over I can now focus on caring for them rather than worrying about them being smothered by weeds or each other.  This is plenty of space for carrots to grow and thrive.

Picking Iceberg Lettuce Leaves for the First Time This Season

I finally just started picking my lettuce leaves today and I was able to collect quite a few for the first harvest of 2016.  In total I got 70 leaves from only my iceberg lettuce and my Ruby glow hybrid are not ready yet and I will begin picking those leaves or the whole plant within a couple of weeks or so depending on weather conditions. 

Since it rained yesterday some of the leaves got some dirt on them which is nothing to fret about because I usually wash all the leaves I pick.  Soaking them in water is a good way to remove all the dirt from the leaves if you have never picked lettuce leaves before.

I also decided on taking some pictures of one of my plants just before I started picking leaves from it.  I wanted to see the difference between before harvesting and just after harvesting them.

The plants still look good and I wouldn't be surprised if I get plenty of more harvests from these plants.  I also am looking forward to picking some of my Ruby glow hybrid leaves.  I didn't get to pick them last year and was hoping to pick them this season and see how good they taste compared to iceberg or green lettuce.

Weeded Onions and Most Seeds Have Begun Sprouting

I would say that I have been busy in the garden this past week.  This includes thinning out many of my plants, weeding all my onions both in totes and in the ground, and adding a thick layer of mulch to my onions. 

First I want to talk about the plants that have begun sprouting.  I had many transplants that I added to the garden, but they didn't fill up the rows that I gave them which happens every season.  With the extra room in the row I just fill them with seeds.  This is basically growing them directly in the ground which still works and is a great way to insure that you get at least one good plant at the least.

I only thinned out my corn, cucumbers, and melons for now.  The others will come later since I didn't think that they had finished sprouting entirely.  My corn and the others looked as if they were done with their sprouting phase.

I started with corn since it is one of the easiest to thin out.

You can easily see the before and after of my corn, cucumbers, and melons from the above pictures.  I also wanted to mention some weeding that I did this week.  I normally wouldn't write about weeding that much, but my totes were filled with so many weeds that you couldn't see the onion stems.  Take a look at them below.

You should never let weeds get this out of control.  Any longer and my onion plants might show signs of ill health.  Before that happened I made certain to remove every weed from each tote.

 This is how onions in totes are supposed to look like.  With no weeds at all is how they are supposed to look all year long.

To make sure weeds don't ever come back for the rest of the year I added a thick layer of mulch that I collect this past weekend.